Beneath the Dunes
by AsianScaper
Summary: Set somewhere between Dune and the Children of Dune, Paul Muad'dib deals with a strange vision that not only threatens his very cause for being, but sows the seeds of doubt as well. Note: this is an inquiry on death.


  
**Title:**_ Beneath the Dunes_   
**Author/s:** Larq, al'Laine, and AsianScaper   
**Summary:** Set somewhere between Dune and the Children of Dune, Paul Muad'dib deals with a strange vision that not only threatens his very cause for being, but sows the seeds of doubt as well.   
**Disclaimer:** Arrakis and its contents are property of Frank Herbert. The Arrakeen song, however, is mine.   
**Rating:** G   
**Category:** Drama   
**Feedback:** Send your criticism, comments, or insights to larq003@hotmail.com or to allaine003@hotmail.com.   
**Archiving:** You may put it anywhere you wish but be sure to get my permission first or I'll bite your head off.   
**Spoilers:** None   
**Dedication:** To Frank Herbert, for his vision and his genius. To the sci-fi community, where the future of humanity is rendered to existence.   
**Author's Note:** I'm not very comfortable with this piece. It was done posthaste. If you can make an interpretation, I'd love to hear it. This one was something that I simply conjured from the depths of my mind and I haven't a clue to its purpose. 

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His eyes touched the dunes of the desert and his feet ground the sand beneath him, like the iron of the mill. The sigh that swept past swells of golden grains felt the desiccated air that moaned in soft torture for water that had never been. Indeed, even as the sun seized the nip of twilight, it gasped its fiery heat and bent upon the land to once more rob its inhabitance of shelter. 

"Muad'dib?"

The tall, robed man hushed the woman beside him and said, "Chani, the desert waits for no man."

The two Fremen, the first who spoke and the other who answered had heads swallowed by the mouth of their stillsuits. They crouched cautiously behind the dune, watching movement beyond like tigers that hid beneath the tall grasses. As the sun raked at their flesh, so did its ravaging heat endow the golden soil beneath them with the powers of death. 

Paul and Chani moved with the precision and comfort of beasts in their domain, grasping their drab cloaks behind them to keep the material from betraying their location.

"Look," Paul said, pointing at a dark figure at the bottom of the rise. "Who…?"

The dark cloak did not dance against the jaunty ballad of the wind and shadows peered from the gloom of his hood. A curved knife was all that decorated his waist as the cloak slit in half when a gloved hand peeked from under the folds. The hilt glittered silver but the blade blinked like a quarter moon, its limpid glow the shape of a sickle as the cloak slipped into place once more.

"Muad'dib!"

Chani's eyes, which were deprived of their whites as all Fremen have them, blinked to consume the sapphire sea of her sight as sand churned and danced like dragons upon the wind. Pulling the hood over her head, she sought shelter inside the hood of her cloak and put a hand on Paul's shoulder to remind him of the coming storm.

Her whisper sounded like a prayer, "Paul, we have to get to the rocks. Quickly!"

"What?" Paul asked, bewildered, as if her words had only registered. He stood, dazed, feeling the rising howl that spoke of dead men and altered landscapes. Paul stole a glance behind, at the being he had just seen standing at the foot of a gigantic dune only to find that he was…gone.

An insistent voice shouted at the vicinity of his hearing, "Paul, you must hurry! Stilgar is waiting."

Chani grabbed his hand and hurled him forward, forcing him to run the extra mile across sand that by now had risen from their place and were carousing in crazed steps. "A storm!" another voice called from the rocks just a few meters ahead of them. "Muad'dib! Quickly! Grab my hand!"

Paul Muad'dib, leader of the Fremen and the dreaded Fedaykin, was pulled up the rocks by a bearded fellow with eyes bluer than the grass was green. The sight that he endured were cerulean seas of an infinite hue and Paul paused to study the Naib, Stilgar. He, too, was in a stillsuit though he did not have his mask on even as the wind's soft murmur turned into an insistent howl that told of men the sand had stripped clean of their flesh.

"Muad'dib," Stilgar whispered piercingly, his voice the shrill tone of a raven's nether croon. Death. "It is a good thing that this storm cared enough to warn us it was coming."

"I know, Stil. You should not worry about me." Paul pulled Chani from the foot of the rock, pebbles trembling under his feet as her weight burdened him with its presence. The insistent breeze, filled with the strength of a coming tempest, chided at his hair like deer upon brambles, gasping its warning with a whispering moan. "Come. We have work to do."

Entering the cleft in the rocks just as a forceful zephyr blew into the cavern, Paul and his two companions shed the mask of their stillsuits and followed the winding passage to the bigger hollow that glowed its eerie light.

Kynes' daughter followed his lead and she savored the gentle feel of his hand on her shoulder, rare in itself even as they shared a sietch. The very sensation of it brought memories of happiness that made her smile; Paul caught the joy of her Fremen beam and kissed her tenderly on her forehead. Then, his brows furrowed as a memory snatched the moment from his eyes.

"I saw something, Chani. I saw someone…standing by the dunes..." he told her as they walked into the sietch of red rock and stone; a statement plucked from the confines of a hidden torment.

"I know, Muad'dib. I know you did."

Stilgar overheard and offered a rather sadistic, "He will be dead after the storm passes, Muad'dib."

Paul walked on without another word, his arms around Chani's waist, his breath deep with the sounds of meditation. Stilgar wondered greatly about the girl's power to calm the leader of the ruthless Fedaykin and her own relentless belief in what Paul could do. By the way Muad'dib looked upon the woman with tender eyes, he would have killed the first man who lifted a hand against her.

As both man and woman walked across the formations of the sietch, Fremen and Fedaykin alike stood wary of their master and sat around the glowglobes that illumined the sietch. The terrible noise of rock against sand rattled the air inside as the squall bit with sharpened teeth at all living and unliving on this desert planet.

Rock rose from the confines of Sietch Tabr. It provided openings and chasms of earth and stone, which glowed a grim color of brown against the firelight. Shadows danced about the offing, mistaking a real Fremen from its kin. They merely washed the earthen walls with their sober hands, neither knowing nor caring that in effect, visions of a desert planet scratched their scrawny fingers into Paul's vulnerable inner eye.

An elder woman, her figure swathed in robes, approached them as warily as the rest of the men had. Paul Muad'dib stared down at his mother, his sapphire eyes consuming his mother's own spice-debilitated sight. 

"Paul." 

By the gestures she expressed and the shadows they conjured, she was both afraid and very much concerned for the young man before her who not only stared with anger, but with regret as well. She dared not shrink away in front of so many when Paul settled his hand on her shoulder, his shoulders bent, as if in recognition of a blight that would never leave him. The ring that encircled one of his fingers made a significant depression on her shoulder, reminding her of whom he was, the son of the father, Duke Leto Atreides.

Jessica, the concubine of the dead Duke and mother to Paul, choked down the memory of her beloved and instead, watched her son's features flicker against the light of the glowglobes.

The oval face that came from her, had the obscure angles of maturity that in another time, Jessica had known to have come from the father. Her premonitions though, told her otherwise. Muad'dib, as the people were now accustomed to calling him, had been born with this slight burden of strength and rancor only to have it nurtured by the hostility of this blistering planet called Arrakis. But the father was there, looking at her with _her_ eyes and she was suddenly gripped with the natural maternal affection for her son.

"Mother," Paul said, unconcerned and cold. The strange connection between them was severed as he once more withdrew his hand.

The Reverend Mother of the Fremen did not move from her place. Arrogance lit the blueness of her eyes and the firm set of her cheeks.

"Paul?" Jessica searched his intense gaze with the calm she did not feel. "What ails you, son?"

"Nothing that concerns you, mother," was his reply, stepping aside.

His shoulders brushed hers as he walked past her. Chani gave the Lady Jessica an apologetic nod. "He has been acting strange lately, Reverend Mother. He has been seeing a man…at the foot of the dunes and sometimes, he cannot discern if it was a vision or not."

Jessica closed her eyes and her face twisted slightly in confusion. "I had seen a man at the foot of the dunes once...a long time ago...It was then that I knew my mortality more than my soul."

"A bad omen, Reverend Mother?" Chani inquired politely though curiosity had all but lit her expression.

There was fear in the Reverend Mother's eyes as she said quietly, "No. Something much worse, dear child. Something much worse."

_________

"Paul…" Whispers that flew upon the wind, holding its withering contents with a corporal hand.

"Paul…" Whispers that bent over the dunes to write passing symbols upon the sand.

Consciousness poked its spiked fingers against the filament of the dream world to wake him but Sleep continued to sing its obscure seduction, plucking at a strange harp that whispered its elements of wind and sand.

"Paul…" Whispers that held the earthen jar which spread rose petals upon the water.

Paul's eyes blinked open and they were wider than they ever had been. A chord of nature's control had somehow been played like a curse rather than a blessing.

_Water?_

The drip, drip of a fading dream left an ambiguous shadow.

Chani stirred and even as Paul remained quiet for her, she woke from her sleep and with her blue within blue eyes, studied him meticulously by moonlight.

A soft song was being sung even at the height of midnight. Paul reckoned that the voice was Gurney's, strung with silver yet hewn rigid with age. Oddly, it was an Arrakeen ballad and the tune lilted with the mystery of the desert.

_...Hope paints a dainty picture   
Pillars complete, not broken   
And the Maker concocts a tender mixture   
Whose tastes are the sounds of heaven..._

Gurney was not one to sing religious melodies yet within this burrow in the rocks, it was strangely proper.

Silvery fingers of the moon's creation dipped quietly against their bodies and Paul shivered at the feeling of dread that overcame him as a creature howled sorrowfully against the firmament of the sands.

"Something is bothering you, Usul."

He brushed a strand of her hair from her forehead, sighing heavily. "You know me too well, Chani. You know me too well." He withdrew his hand to caress the soft skin of her arm. "Visions. And the same man."

As he leaned on his forearm, his head resting on his hand with Chani below him, Kynes' daughter watched him as the desert would watch its Fremen, with love and a certain harshness it seemed to lose.

"What do you see Muad'dib?" she asked him gently, tracing his jaw and smiling at the beard that had started to grow there.

"I…I can't see beyond the figures." The uncertainty in his voice was something Chani had learned to anticipate, even as it came very seldom and had the talent of making Paul decide between the extremes of their effects. "They're like smells I recognize but I can't see their faces. I don't know who they are. Fate doesn't touch them. I can't touch them."

"And it scares you," Chani added softly, kissing his cheek. "There are many things you cannot control, Muad'dib. Perhaps this is one of them."

"I am the Kwisatz Haderach. This has never happened before."

"When you encountered your first storm, Muad'dib, _that_ had never happened before yet you survived." She looked at him tenderly, brushing her hands against his face that had already hardened against Arrakeen storms. "Come, my love. You must sleep."

The soft voice blew into the chamber, taking with it the troubled choir.

_...But the men who weep for eternity stilled   
Their own hands emptiness mold   
For they immovable in their sorrow filled   
Beauty unleashed, anger made bold..._

Paul stared at the stars that winked at him from outside and once more, surrendered to the Muse of that fleeting death called slumber.

Just as the haze fell over him, embracing his troubled mind, he found the wavering shadow of a man still standing at the foot of the dunes. Waiting…waiting…

__________

**-The End-**


End file.
